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A Tip on Slavery, Holocaust Talk

Repeat after us: never – ever — compare anything to slavery, the Holocaust or any such emotion-laden atrocity or injustice unless you want to catch all kinds of grief.

Sigh. This been a particularly tough week for politicians who just can’t help themselves.

Representative Trent Franks, Republican of Arizona, became the latest offender on Friday when he said the high abortion rate among African-Americans has done greater harm to their population than slavery. “Far more of the African-American community is being devastated by the policies of today than were being devastated by policies of slavery,” Mr. Frank told a blogger, Mike Stark. “What does it take to get us to wake up?”

This came a day after Senator Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa, compared the battle to overhaul health care to the fight for desegregation (“We don’t allow segregation on the basis of race,” Mr. Harkin said at Thursday’s health-care summit.)

And that came just three days after Senator Bernie Sanders, independent of Vermont, compared people who questioned climate change today to people who ignored the Nazi threat in the 1930s.

“It reminds me of an event that took place in this country and around the world in the late 1930s,” Mr. Sanders said of climate-change skeptics at a Senate hearing.

President Obama drew criticism on Thursday when he said, “we don’t have a strategy yet,” for military action against ISIS in Syria. Lawmakers will weigh in on Mr. Obama’s comments on the Sunday shows.Read more…